In this study, Co/Cu-decorated carbon nanofibers are introduced as novel electrocatalyst for methanol oxidation. The introduced nanofibers have been prepared based on graphitization of poly(vinyl alcohol) which has high carbon content compared to many polymer precursors for carbon nanofiber synthesis. Typically, calcination in argon atmosphere of electrospun nanofibers composed of cobalt acetat...

Random-type anion-exchange membranes (AEMs) have been prepared by blending poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) and the random copolymer-type polycation, poly(vinyl alcohol-co-methacryloyl aminopropyl trimethyl ammonium chloride) at various molar percentages of anion-exchange groups to vinyl alcohol groups, Cpc, and by cross-linking the PVA chains with glutaraldehyde (GA) solution at various GA concentrat...

The utility of polymer-metal nanocomposite thin films with in situ generated silver nanoparticles as substrates for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is demonstrated. Thin films of poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(vinyl butyral-co-vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) containing Ag nanoparticles generated in situ through thermal annealing and photoirradiation, respectively (Ag-PVA and Ag-PVVV), ar...

We develop coarse-grained force fields for poly (vinyl alcohol) and poly (acrylic acid) oligomers. In both cases, one monomer is mapped onto a coarsegrained bead. The new force fields are designed to match structural properties such as radial distribution functions of various kinds derived by atomistic simulations of these polymers. The mapping is therefore constructed in a way to take into acc...